By IANS
Caracas : The sound of cash registers is the pervading Christmas music in Caracas, even as the promoter of “socialism of the 21st century,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calls for a fight against consumerism and “savage capitalism”.
Venezuela today is an odd mixture that combines the socialist ideology of the “revolutionary process” together with unbridled consumerism fed by economic uncertainty and rising inflation, calculated at more than 20 percent in 2007, which makes saving an almost useless undertaking.
Shopping malls in the Venezuelan capital, pride and daily refuge of hundreds of thousands of Caracas residents, are crowded with citizens these days trying to find gifts for the year-end holidays, Spain’s EFE news agency reported.
Everything is available: plasma TVs, digital cameras, the latest cell phones, laptop and notebook computers, designer sunglasses, all bought with the extra Christmas pay check that salaried Venezuelans receive.
“Money burns a hole in Venezuelans’ pockets,” said Nelson Gonzalez, a salesman at the Sambil shopping center on the east side of Caracas and considered the country’s biggest.
The waiting list for buying a car in Venezuela can take months, so that even second-hand cars are coveted treasures and one of the best investments, since they scarcely lose any value.
The Automobile Chamber of Venezuela reported that between last January and November, 449,549 new cars were sold, 45.6 percent more than in the same period of the previous year, which the government flaunts as a sign of economic improvement in the country, the world’s fifth largest oil exporter.
Caracas’ constant traffic jams are crammed with all those new cars whose gas tanks can be filled for only a dollar. They join the nation’s total automobile fleet where dilapidated cars from the 1970s that Venezuelans’ mechanical creativity keeps on the road run alongside brand new Hummers and the latest models from Toyota.
On the other hand, when shoppers go to the supermarket looking for the most ordinary products, they find a strange paradox: eggs, milk, chicken and sugar are scarce and many shelves are empty.
According to the government, this is due to a policy of hoarding by national producers who prefer to send their products to a parallel market or abroad rather than sell them in markets where the government has established price controls for some 120 basic foods.
Producers and storekeepers, however, say that the scarcity of basic products is caused by the “unrealistic” price controls in force since March 2003, as well as by the rigid official rate of exchange at 2,159 bolivars in the dollar.
Nonetheless, in some downtown areas of the Venezuelan capital, such as Capitolio, El Silencio and La Hoyada, swarms of street vendors offer all the basic, price-controlled products at much higher prices than the government has established.
Trays of eggs, chicken and powdered milk are stacked up for sale by vendors in the busy historic centre of the Venezuelan capital, while big supermarkets announce product scarcities with posters that request, for example, that shoppers buy only two litres of milk per person due to the lack of stocks.
Analysts say that it is the parallel currency-exchange market, where the dollar has at times tripled the official value that pushes up prices not only for basic products but also for everything sold in the country.
Finance Minister Rodrigo Cabezas implicitly acknowledged this situation when he announced in mid-December a plan for more flexible price controls.
As a first measure, the Venezuelan government last week decided to free the price of UHT milk with a long shelf life, which can only be found outside official channels of distribution.
Caracas shoppers will no longer have to go all over town looking for it, nor wait in the endless lines of the Mercales, the public markets organized by the government, to get milk at subsidized prices.
Eggs and sugar, however, will continue to lead a double life in the limbo known as the “informal economy,” waiting for President Chavez’s revolution to solve the paradoxes of “socialism of the 21st century.”